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Article ID: CBB830013873

Sugar Machines and the Fragile Infrastructure of Commodities in the Nineteenth Century (2018)

Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 33
Issue: 1
Pages: 63-84
Publication date: 2018
Language: English

DOI: 10.1086/699234

URI: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/699234

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Machines Technology Science and economics Transmission of material objects Agriculture Sugar and sugar industry Globalization; internationalization Commodity exchanges 19th century

This essay uses sugar machinery to explore the fragile infrastructure that allowed global commodity traffic to emerge. In the nineteenth century, the cane sugar industry transformed the Caribbean, the Hawaiian Islands, and much of the rest of the tropical world. Observers then and now tied sugar’s revolutionary power to the invention and spread of advanced mechanical technologies. Yet the origins and lives of those machines themselves have remained obscure. The superficially effortless circulation of standardized material goods like sugar depended on carefully cultivated systems for managing people, paper, objects, and knowledge—and such things could not be standardized so easily.

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Article Lukas Rieppel; Eugenia Lean; William Deringer (2018) Introduction: The Entangled Histories of Science and Capitalism. Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 1-24). unapi

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